Learning Management System/Experience Platform Alpha: Sprint 7

Welcome to our roundup of Sprint 7 – our penultimate sprint of the project. This sprint as Tom says below was one for the user research, the user experience audit and a big push for the Democratic Services work, all of which we discussed in our show and tell. If you couldn’t make the session, catch up here on what we’ve been up to.

Steering Group

We met with the Steering Group this week after the last session was cancelled due to low attendance in half term. We brought the group up to speed with our progress over the last four weeks and discussed the report we’re currently writing. It’s currently 19 pages and 9 appendices so it’s going to be a whopper! This report is being finalised for 26 November and then we’ll be communicating the results to platform owners. We’ll be delaying the next Steering Group by a week until 02/12/21 to ensure we have time to have the conversations needed before we can discuss the result more widely.

Most importantly, we want to include an indication of level of interest across the LAs within the report, which we know would be useful for the Welsh Government. This isn’t a financial obligation or commitment at all, but just meanswe understand the interest in the work and ensure anyone interested is included in any future work that happens. The Steering Group representatives are letting us know about this in the coming week.

Democratic Services Content

This sprint we’ve finalised the sign off process and have a list of which Heads of Democratic Services are signing off which modules. A big thank you in advance to those people for doing this! We’ve now got:

• 7 courses ready for sign off
• 6 having amends made
• 1 ready for testing
• 2 ready for their subject matter expert workshops
• 2 right at the start of the process.

My contract ends on 26 November, so this sprint has been vital in getting the content to the right place for the final sprint later in November. Whilst the work won’t be finished before the end of my contract, I’ll be pushing to get as much completed as possible. There are a few more meetings and discussions to have to get the last bits into those 6 courses ready for them to be signed off. Roll on sprint 8!

UX

In Sprint 7 we finished the UX/accessibility review of Learning@Wales and Learning Pool and tested these two platforms on a mobile device, using Google Chrome as our test browser. We highlighted various pain points and development issues on both platforms along with recommending .GOV and UX/development solutions and best practices. We have now completed a review of all the platforms on both desktop and mobile and will now document the findings and recommendations in Sprint 8.

UR

Sprint 7 was a busy time for user research! This was the sprint where the platform testing for all 3 platforms took place. We tested the platforms with 2 volunteers from each of the 4 different user roles (learners, managers, platform administrators and content developers/trainers) so Sabah, my user research colleague, and I facilitated 24 separate platform testing sessions! These went well and gave us some great insight, which we will now be feeding into the report that will be written during Sprint 8.

Also, in Sprint 7 I finished conducting interviews with existing users of the 3 platforms, and we tested 4 more of the 20 democratic services courses, meaning that there are now only 4 courses left for content testing and by the end of Sprint 8 these should all be complete.

Next steps

These are our final next steps which involve completing the project! We’ve got up until the 26 Nov to work on the report and the appendices. We’ll then be discussing the results of this with the platform owners and with the Digital Transformation Fund, and subsequently the Steering Group on 2 Dec and show tell attendees on 9 Dec. If you’d like an invite to the Steering Group session, email me and I’ll ensure you’re invited.